This vibrant and authentically executed story of a young woman from a meager family against her father's wishes goes to Tokyo to become a dancer. The immersive, sharply etched quality of photography closely follows the woman played by Bambi Naka as Yume through various behind the scenes life of real Japan with plenty of appetizing exposure to apparently real dancers in many different settings including Hip-Hop, Go-Go, S&M, and modern. There are elements of Bill Murray's character experiencing Japan in the Oscar Best Picture nominee Lost In Translation (2003) and some of the crisp cinematography from Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999). This dance movie far exceeds the typical dramatic storyline of almost any film in the dance genre in its efforts to depict real dance and living life without pretention or fictional drama that often exudes from most other dance movies. Instead, the audience is invited along with Yume to actually experience pieces of her life as she seeks a foothold in Japan as a dancer. The only two obvious weaknesses that hold this movie back from near perfection is the just slightly undeveloped reveal of how Yume is able to really afford to stay in Japan even as great glimpses of her being a hostess and another dance job further on in the movie and her climatic physically painful dance competition routine of the movie just does not quite have the amazing choreographic power to convince the audience of its importance to the movie's ending (under-utilizing her adopted crow stage name and limited use of the stage with a custom that does not allow her to really show off herself as she dances physically or visually nor do we really see much of the audience making dance competition less than authentic). Nevertheless, Dreams On Fire is one the best dance movies produced.
Review of Dreams on Fire
